Things for short attention spans

I'll be brief.

The Ten Sec Film Fest, one of my newest links, is fun.

Espresso Stories are 25 words or fewer.

Like this post.

Nine great room-escapers

As part of my ongoing series of links to online adventure games, I present today's installment, room-escapers.

The Mystery of Time and Space, or MOTAS, is one of the classic room-escapers, involving not just one but a series of levels for you to find your way out of. With good puzzles and nice graphics, it's an all-around fun game. Includes an in-game chat room for hints, and you can find a walkthrough in the game's forum.




Another of the classics is the series by FASCO-CS, including the original Crimson Room, the Viridian Room, and the Blue Chamber, which is a rather weak add-on to the series. A fourth game, the Pink Prison, has been in the works for quite some time. In these games, which feature simple, line-drawn graphics in bold solid colors, you are sealed in a single room and must poke and prod in all the corners to find the items you need to escape. Sometimes success can depend on finding very tiny hidden clickspots -- they can be frustrating, but very rewarding. In Japanese and English.
The site provides its own help and game guides for each game.






Another interesting room-escaper is Droom, also Japanese. Droom has nice 3D graphics and some interesting plot features. Your speed in this game -- number of moves -- matters, and there are multiple endings. This is one of my favorites.
There is a walkthrough in the Nordinho forums.




The Doors is a fun, surreal game in which you are trapped in a hallway with four doors. The line-graphics are slick and appealing, and this game, unlike the others, features sound, with atmospheric music and ambient noise.
There is a walkthrough in the Nordinho forums.




Finally, the French designer Anode & Cathode has a trilogy of games that I absolutely adore: the Office, the House, and the Museum. Each game has a unique visual style, from the cute pastel pixel-art of the Office to the stylish hand-drawn House to the sleek painted Museum, my favorite of the three. While the Office is definitely a room-escaper (with a somewhat arbitrary solution mechanism, but it's fun enough to forgive), the others probably don't strictly fall into this category -- you're restricted to one area, but your primary motivation is discovery, not escape. In the House, you must put together the pieces to uncover an event that happened in your past, and in the Museum, you must interact with the works of art in a very strange gallery. I've heard that there is a fourth game, the Car, that can only be accessed if you perform a particular sequence of events in the House, but I've never found it. In French and (good) English.
You can find help for the games at the Anode & Cathode Forum.






Up next: Samarost-style games.

Updates galore

As you can see, I've done a bit of tweaking around here. I tried to make the format deviate at least a little from the default. I'm fairly happy with the result. Things to do in the future: get the bluetea image slapped up on some host somewhere so I can put it in the sidebar, and maybe find an interesting background for the blog (also reliant on finding an image host). I'd also like to find out how to customize the comments page, but that's still a bit beyond me. Anybody know how?

I renamed the "comments" link to "sips." Clever, eh? Makes you want to comment, doesn't it?

You'll notice a few new categories on the side, and a whole slew of new links. Many of them, whether through theft or coincidence, will probably be familiar to Maktaaq, but that's just because she has good taste. Please do browse through a couple of them. Because I have good taste, too.

I suppose the next thing to do is fill out my profile. Should be fun.


reading: Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis; John Gardner, Grendel

music: Katamari Damacy soundtrack (again!)
beverage: Twinings English Breakfast tea

This is it.

Blurty is dead. Long live Blue Tea.

I've discontinued my Blurty in favor of this thing that you are currently reading. I think it's the right choice.

It's time for changes, I suppose. Last Saturday was my graduation from Bard College; I now officially no longer have to check the "some college" box while filling out forms. I am now a respected citizen of society, a holder of a college degree. My diploma is in Latin and everything.

Yesterday was when the majority of people in the world that I know and care about packed their belongings into little cars and left. Fortunately a small handful of our friends are underclassmen, meaning both that I get to enjoy their company in the coming year, and that the other alums will return to visit them from time to time. But any future encounters with these dear friends of mine are likely to be only fleeting. I am quite saddened.

Today was the first quiet day that I've had to myself in some time. I slept in, and have spent most of the day playing games and reading. Soon I need to work on finding a permanent job, but I need a little time to rest. I have a little time to get things in order before June 10th, when K and I and two other friends will embark on a three-week-long cross-country road trip, something that I've always wanted to do. With luck, I can have some prospects for work lined up for when I return. And then it will be time to work my ass off to pay for the trip.

But enough about plans. As usual, it's much more fun for me to share cool things than talk about my life.

Today I tackled an interesting-looking game that's been in my links list for a long time, but which I'd never gotten around to. It's Die Anstalt: Psychiatrie für misshandelte Kuscheltiere (The Asylum: Psychiatry for Abused Cuddly Toys), a cleverly animated cartoon game in which you play psychiatrist and use a variety of clinical therapies and techniques such as dream analysis and play therapy in an attempt to diagnose and cure the maladies of your patients, a collection of unfortunate plush toys. The game is quite engaging and ingenious. In German, English, and Italian.

I also came across an interesting article in the LA Times about a talk Marjane Satrapi gave at West Point, where Persepolis is required reading. (Latimes.com requires registration; you can use www.bugmenot.com to acquire a login without registering.)


reading: Kazuko Okakura, The Book of Tea; David Sedaris, Barrel Fever
saw: Five Minutes and a Deck of Cards (senior project by a brilliant filmmaker friend of mine, featuring two three-second shots of me in the distance); Black Hawk Down; Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (Midnight showing on opening day!); Proof of Life

music: the Katamari Damacy soundtrack (track: "The Moon and the Prince")
beverage: gunpowder green tea

A post I want to entitle "Errata" but can't

I have it in my head that "errata" should mean a collection of miscellaneous, meandering things, wandering here and there, but it doesn't. Pity.

I've submitted my senior project, had my board. The semester -- the year -- college -- is ending. I've got my Class of 2005 shirt on right now. Lots to be said about that, but I don't feel like going into it at the moment. So instead, I'll empty out some links I've been collecting.

First, because of all the language and lit blogs I read, stuff about ... well, language and lit.

An April Fool's joke proposing a march to end the abuse of the widely misused phrase, "beg the question." Sounds like a worthy cause to me.

It came up in our field studies class, so Bill sent us all a list (several lists, actually...this was the first and seemed sufficient to me) of collective nouns for groups of animals. I knew there were some crazy ones, but there are some crazy ones. A charm of hummingbirds? An ostentation of peacocks? I like "a memory of elephants" and "a storytelling of rooks" ... and "a tower of giraffes" is pretty amazing, as is a "crash" or "bloat" of hippotami. Last of all is the impressive "zeal of zebras"...

I may have posted this previously, I may not have. It's a bit old, but the sarcasm point is introduced.

Booksellers in Scotland stage a promotional book-burning.

The entire literary edifice of the West is built on a lie. According to one suspicious sleuth, "Proust didn't know from madeleines,", and his famous crumbly scallop-shaped cookie never existed.

Harvard students win prizes for the quality of their personal libraries. I want one of those. I also want a prize-worthy library.

Reasons Why the Female Characters in Certain Male-Written Fiction Are Not Like Actual Women at All.

All right, now some other stuff. Let's have a go at religion.

High-schoolers don't know enough about the Bible. They're talking about history and literature, so I agree with them there. I really need me a student's lit Bible.

From The Onion: "Scientology Losing Ground to New Fictionology".

A beautiful comic for the creationists: Science vs. Norse Mythology.

Let's see, what category next. How about "stuff I like."

A Yahoo! News story explains how fairy tales are linked to violent relationships. Seems Andrea Dworkin was right about all those passive heroines waiting for Princes Charming.

I'm increasingly considering copyediting as a profession. Which is probably why this article, an interview with a number of copy editors discuss the details of their largely uncredited and overlooked work, is interesting to me and me alone.

They're having a concert in California of orchestral music from video games performed live. It's called Video Games Live, and Jack Wall, the composer of the brilliant music in Myst III: Exile, is one of the people behind it.

The Forbes.com article Is Sex Necessary? discusses all the beneficial effects conferred by "having regular and enthusiastic sex."

Last category...a kind of alarming article that I post for the public benefit:

"The End of Analog TV? Will America's favorite technology really go dark next year?" Analog television broadcasts are supposed to be discontinued next year, to be replaced by entirely digital broadcasts. It was all part of a federal ruling aimed at switching everyone over to digital -- only no one bought digital, and now the deadline for the change is coming up. Even if it doesn't happen next year -- it will likely be postponed -- it will be happening pretty soon, and currently there is no warning in place for those who buy new analog tvs telling them that their sets might be obsolete in a year! So if you buy a new tv -- buy digital!

I think that's all for now... I'll post some talky stuff later.

Abandoned places

Today I bring you three incredibly beautiful, haunting, point-n-click explorations of surreal, abandoned places. They're not quite games -- they're interactive, but there aren't really puzzles to solve. I have them filed under the "eye candy" section of my games directory. They are all amazing, and you really must treat yourself and visit.

The Hospital. With the captivating tagline of "Stay a while, stay forever," this is a mélange of doctored and manipulated photos of a crumbling, abandoned hospital, with surreal twists and surprises. There is a bit of a challenge if you try to find the links to the original photos which are hidden in each room. I haven't done it yet, but I think there's a reward for finding them all. Spooky and awesome. In both French and (good) English.




The 99 Rooms. There really are 99 of these single-screen rooms, also manipulated photos of the abandoned factories and warehouses of East Berlin's industrial sector. Painted figures and animations fill the decaying spaces. The goal is simply to find the way to click through each of the 99 rooms to the end. Also very beautiful -- "morbidly-beautiful," as the designers describe it -- with great sound and music.
Update: You can hit SPACE to move through the rooms if your get stuck, or, if you really want one, someone has kindly taken the time to make a walkthrough for all 99 rooms. I didn't think anyone ever would; kudos.




NFH Propaganda. Features a Labyrinth of dark, run-down industrial ruins very similar to The 99 Rooms in term of concept, design, and execution. This one is quite a bit darker and grimmer, a horror version of 99 rooms with ghosts, corpses, torture, murder, body parts, screams...it's creepy and very well-done.




That's just a sample of the latest game links I've found that I'm bursting to share. I think I'll keep posting in categories like this. Up next: Room-escapers.